Transcription performed by LeahTranscribes[START OF RECORDING]
JACK: I want to play for you a narration of a piece of classic hacker literature. Everyone should be familiar with this. Some of you may even have parts of this memorized. Here, take a listen from the author himself.
LOYD: Another one got caught today that’s all over the papers. Teenager arrested in computer crime scandal. Hacker arrested after bank tampering. Damn kids, they’re all alike. I’m a hacker. Enter my world. I made a discovery today. I found a computer. And then it happened; a door opened to a world, rushing through the phone line like heroin through an addict’s veins. This is it. This was where I belong. But this is our world now, the world of the electron and the switch, the beauty of the baud. We make use of a service already existing without paying for what could be dirt cheap if it wasn’t run by profiteering gluttons, and you call us criminals. We explore, and you call us criminals. We seek after knowledge, and you call us criminals. You build atomic bombs, you wage wars, you murder, cheat, and lie to us, and try to make us believe that it’s for our own good, yet we’re the criminals. Yes, I am a criminal. My crime is that of curiosity. My crime is that of judging people by what they say and they think, not what they look like. My crime is that of outsmarting you, something that you’ll never forgive me for. I am a hacker, and this is my manifesto. You may stop this individual, but you can’t stop us all. After all, we’re all alike. That was written in 1986. [Applause] My name’s Loyd, by the way, also known as the Mentor.
JACK: That was indeed Loyd Blankenship, the author of the legendary Hacker Manifesto, so legendary that it actually appeared in the movie Hackers. Here, take a listen.
AGENT BOB: This is our world now, the world of the electron and the switch, the beauty of the baud. Yes, I am a criminal. My crime is that of curiosity. I am a hacker, and this is my manifesto. Huh, right? Manifesto? You may stop me, but you can’t stop us all.
AGENT RAY: That’s cool.
AGENT BOB: Cool?
AGENT RAY: Yeah, cool.
AGENT BOB: You think it’s cool?
AGENT RAY: It’s cool.
AGENT BOB: It’s not cool. It’s commie bullshit.
JACK: Loyd wrote that a few days after being arrested for hacking. Loyd was a member of one of the most infamous hacker groups of all time, the Legion of Doom.
(INTRO): [INTRO MUSIC] These are true stories from the dark side of the internet. I’m Jack Rhysider. This is Darknet Diaries. [INTRO MUSIC ENDS]
JACK: Hey. I am in San Francisco and I am looking for a specific building, and while I look for it, I’m gonna walk, and I’m gonna tell you a story, and I want you to come with me. So, you’ve probably heard of the term ‘phreaker’, right, spelled with a PH? This is basically a phone hacker. What a phreaker is is someone who manipulates the phone system to make phreak phone calls or whatever. But did you know that the term ‘phreaker’ and the whole idea of it was injected into the mainstream by Esquire Magazine? Yeah, so, in 1971, Esquire interviewed the guy who created the blue box, and was like, show us how it’s done and all this stuff. The blue box is a magical thing that — you push buttons on it, it had certain tones and things, and if you hold it up to the phone, you can make a phreak phone call or whatever.
It was basically a little box that hacked phones. So, they interviewed this guy, and he showed them how it works and all this sort of thing, and took them — kind of a tour of the underground world of phreakers, which at the time was very small and esoteric. Well, you had to be a geek of geeks in order to be a phreaker at the time. I mean, 1971, this is early phreaking days. So, that article came out, and it pretty much glorified phreaking, saying this is your way to empower yourself. So, that article came out, and it inspired thousands and — tens of thousands of people were reading this thing. Like, how do I get a blue box? How do I make this? I want to get one, too.
So, there was just all this fever suddenly about people asking around, and kids on college campuses were now making blue boxes and getting together and trying to build these things. Of course, it didn’t explain in the article how to make it. So, finding that, it was very difficult. Google wasn’t around at the time. I mean, gosh, the internet wasn’t even around at the time. So, trying to find information on how to build these was pretty hard. But if you looked in the right areas, you could find them, and you ask the right people. Famously, Steve Wozniak read that article and worked with Steve Jobs to say, hey, let’s start building these blue boxes and sell them, and they did. This was their very first company before they started Apple.
They even said, if we didn’t do that, we’d never make Apple, because this was a really good stepping stone to figure out how to work together and build things. So, it wasn’t just like, here’s how to do this cool electrical thing, but something about phreaking was just really cool at the time. The cool kids were doing it. They were like wizards. They could do things to the phones that normal people couldn’t do, and it was real magical at the time to be able to send these crazy signals into the phone and make it do stuff. But the phreakers weren’t just cool kids; they were anti-establishment. It was like, we all have these little rebels inside us as teenagers, and this was a way to really let that rebel fly. Phreakers were a way to push back, to empower yourself, to fight the big monopolies of the world like Ma Bell.
There was a magazine being published at the time called Ramparts, which was being published right here out of San Francisco. That’s where I’m headed right now. Ramparts — I feel like their whole attitude was poke their finger in the eye of the establishment, right? It was like, big corporations are corrupt, and here’s how you — could do to fight back. They were very critical of Christianity and sympathetic of Black Panthers, which were — the government considered them a terrorist group at the time. One of their most famous articles was when they found evidence that the CIA was secretly funding the student protests and student groups on college campuses to try to manipulate political discourse and ideas, and that turned into a huge investigation, and it was a big problem.
So, Ramparts was doing this crazy journalism at the time. Oh, I think I see their office now. Gosh, these buildings are so cool. They’re so old and so beautiful. So, Ramparts saw the phreaker movement stirring up, and they’re like, let’s write an article. The article came out, and it was called How to Hack the Phone Company in Your Home. But it didn’t use the word ‘hack’; it said ‘regulate; How to Regulate the Phone Company in Your Home. I mean, I just read the article, so I’ll summarize it for you. It’s basically saying, you’ve heard of the blue box, but do you know about the mute box? The mute box is pretty cool. Basically, when you’re going to make a long-distance call to someone — now, this was back in the seventies, right? So, I can’t believe I have to explain this.
There weren’t mobile phones yet, so long-distance calls actually cost by the minute, and it was very expensive to make long-distance phone calls. So, what the article says is that when a long-distance phone call connects, there’s a certain signal that gets sent from the receiver — from the receiver’s phone to the phone company indicating this call has connected; let the timer start. So, the toll begins. What this mute box does is it mutes that signal to never let the phone company know that the call started to start the timer for how long the call lasted. It would allow you to receive long-distance calls. Kind of a weird idea, but that’s what a mute box does. The article goes on to explain — now let’s show you how it’s done, how to make one. It has a parts list.
It’s like, get a capacitor and get a resistor and get these kind of switches and put it in a box like this. It tells you how to solder it, how to — what wires to connect, where to put your phone in, and all this kind of stuff. It’s a step-by-step tutorial on how to make a mute box. Not only that; it says, now that you’ve built it, here’s how to use it. Then when you’re using it, here’s how to verify when you’re getting a free call. If you’re hearing these tones, it’s not working. If you’re hearing these tones, it is working. It’s really in depth of how this works and how to make it. I have arrived to where the Ramparts office used to be here on Pine Street in San Francisco. When they published this article in May of 1972, the police raided this office. They went up and they forced them to recall all the issues that they published. Said, get them back here.
Call up every news stand that you sold it to, everyone that you’ve sent it to. Get the article back. You cannot publish this. They were like, what? You’re crazy. They were like, you want a felony? Do you want a felony? Get the articles back here. Do you want a big fine? Either that or get your articles back here. So, they felt really pressured, and they called up as many places as they could to bring the articles back. It cost them $50,000 in lost revenue for buying back their articles or their magazines that they’ve already sold. When I heard that story, my immediate thing was, wait, what? The First Amendment of the constitution says Congress shall make no laws to restrict freedom of speech or freedom of press, and this is a press. They’re just making magazines. They’re doing journalistic work here. What happened was the phone company was so mad that this article came out that they asked the California police to do something.
What the California police did was they found a rule in the law, California penal code 502.7. It says you cannot sell devices that will be used to defraud the phone company, and you cannot sell schematics or distribute plans or teach others how to defraud the phone company. I am just perplexed by this because — what? How is any YouTube video exist…? This law still exists on the books. It’s never been recalled or appealed or anything like that. So, how does any YouTube video exist that teaches you how to hack? How does any article exist that teaches you how to hack? I mean, shoot, just a little bit down the road from me is Stanford, and Stanford has classes on how to hack, how to do this exact thing. There are certificates on how to hack. It’s like, all these things exist, yet it’s against the law to teach someone how to hack? Are you serious? So, Ramparts couldn’t recover from this, and that was the article that ended all articles for them.
After that, the damage to the company, the reputation, the legal threats, the financial blow, was too much. So, Ramparts had to shut down, and that was it for them. [Music] I feel like as I’m sitting here looking up at the Ramparts office, the old building there, I could see that times have changed between then and now. These are old buildings. But that fight still wages on. It’s still going strong. Is there forbidden knowledge that we shouldn’t share? Is there stuff that should be hushed up? Is there illegal tutorials out there that we shouldn’t put out? It’s often questioned. All I gotta say is rest in peace, Ramparts. I think you started something much bigger than what you were.
Okay, I’m back in the studio now, and I just pulled something out of storage. I’m gonna turn it on, and you see if you can guess what this is. [Machine whirring, clicking] That noise right there is so nostalgic to me. It’s the sound of the Apple IIe starting up. This wasn’t my computer. It was the family computer, right? I just inherited it. [Whirring] You hear that? This thing’s mad because I don’t have a disc in the drive. It doesn’t — see, here’s the thing; this is an Apple IIe, right? Even though it’s an Apple product, it does not resemble anything that you imagine an Apple product to resemble. This thing is a full computer but has no hard drive. It has no operating system at all. So, for anything to get working, you have to put a floppy disc in the disc drive. That’s like opening up an app, though, right?
You can only have one app open on this computer at a time. It is ridiculous. So, I have to push this in, close this door, and then it’s still mad. [Whirs] It’s still trying to find the disc. Oh my gosh, hearing these noises invokes so many memories. When did circuitry stop humming and making noise? I miss that. These were the days when you didn’t just use a computer; you kind of danced with it. Getting things to work felt more like alchemy than anything. You might try something three times and it would work one out of three times even though you didn’t change anything. Manuals and books were impossible to find. So, you were on your own figuring out commands and settings without a tutorial. There was one sound in particular that when you heard it, it gave you a rush.
It made you feel like this thing is capable of infinite possibilities. That sound was [dial tone] the dial tone. Hearing that noise from your computer felt like you had the whole world at your fingertips, a world where you could go anywhere and do anything. [Music] The dial tone was the sound of potential, pure potential. We’re so hyper-connected these days that you don’t even realize that you’re always online, but back in the eighties it was a big deal to go online, and it wasn’t like anything it is now. BBSs were popular then, which stands for bulletin board system, and it was often just some person running a computer out of their house, and if you call their house with a telephone which was connected to your computer, you could connect to their computer and read what it had on it.
But it was way more complicated than that. Finding their phone number to dial was hard, to start with. Google wasn’t around yet to ask, hey, what phone number should I dial and what BBSs should I check out? So, you had to ask around in person, like to your friends and family. Maybe a local electronics shop might be able to help. Hey, do you know any good BBSs I should try? They might give you a few phone numbers. Then setting up your modem was a whole thing. You had to configure it for like, twenty minutes just to get it to work right. When you finally get it working and you dial the number, the line was busy. Of course, because any popular BBS would have all kinds of people trying to connect to it and see what’s there. So, you had to just keep dialing it again and again and again in hopes to get through eventually.
When you finally got through, it felt like wizardry. The pixels on your screen would light up, showing you a portal into another world, and you’d get this sudden rush of excitement that you made a successful connection. You were in. Now it was time to look around and see what’s in there. BBSs might show you articles, like technical articles or political things. There might be programs to try, or there would just be messages from other users talking about their day. As you connected to these BBSs, you’d start to draw a map of the internet. You would take notes of all the places that you visited; their phone numbers, what they had, tips on connecting into it, your username that you used there. Often a BBS might lead you to another BBS, where it would say, if you like this place, you might also like this other place.
Now you’re starting to build a list of potential phone numbers that might work. The internet was rapidly changing, so a lot of phone numbers that you got were old phone numbers and they didn’t work anymore. They were for old BBSs that shut down or just stopped working. So, for a lot of people in the eighties, they really wanted to know more of what was out there. You could dial any phone number, and it may or may not have a computer connected to it. There was no official map or search engine back then to show you around the internet. The internet was very dark, and it was hard to navigate. Like, you have no idea how exhausting it was to try to do all this without a manual or a clear tutorial on how anything worked. But while it was cool and all to connect to a BBS, that’s just one other computer in the world.
That’s just a computer you dialed into at someone’s house or something, which wasn’t connected to anything else. Surely there are bigger, more powerful computers in the world out there, but where? Surely there must be whole computer networks out there where you could bounce around from machine to machine. Yes, in fact, businesses, governments, and universities often had the biggest computers and the coolest networks to get into. So, what was the biggest computer network back then? [Music] It was the telephone system, or technically the PSTN, which stands for public switched telephone network. By the 1980s, the phone system was being more and more controlled by computers.
Back in the early days, you had switchboard operators, actual humans that you told them what number you wanted to connect to, and they would connect that call for you by plugging in a wire. It wasn’t until the 1980s where electronic switches became so popular that there was no longer a need for human switchboard operators. These electronic phone switches were fascinating. They’d listen to the tones on the phone line to make their decisions; to connect people, to disconnect people, and of course, hackers — or I should say phreakers — were very curious what tones they could send the switches to make them do things.
As technology progressed, those phone switches became computer-driven, which meant it was possible to get into a phone switch and see all the calls connected, disconnect them if you want, listen in on calls. Yeah, those computers were sometimes remotely accessible so that the phone company could get in there and configure and troubleshoot things, too. So, it meant that you could technically control the phones from a terminal on your computer in your house. It was just a matter of knowing what phone numbers to dial into and which computer to connect to. So, you can imagine the phone company did not want the phone number to these switches to be publicly known. At the same time, phreakers were desperate to find them.
Because it was the largest network in the world, it became the coolest thing to hack back in the 1980s. They weren’t just trying to figure out how to make free calls. They were also trying to figure out how the phone system worked in general. It was about being able to touch and interact with the largest network in the world. It was all about learning something new. There was one guy who was very curious how the phone network worked, and wanted to get in and learn more. His name was Paul. [Music] Paul Stira was a high-schooler living in Queens, New York. What Paul liked doing was war dialing. He’d just dial phone number after phone number to see if there was a computer on the other end that would pick up. But if you just dial random numbers, you’re likely to get someone’s house.
Someone would pick up the phone and say, hello? And then you’d hang up and try another number. But then someone gave him a tip. They said, hey, try calling higher numbers, like the last numbers in a block. Like, you know, phone numbers that end in 9999. Those numbers are often reserved by the telephone company themselves, so there’s a higher chance that they might be connected to a computer. So, he tried calling 555-9900, then 9901 and 9987, 9955. He didn’t like doing things in sequential order. Eventually Paul found a few numbers that responded to his calls and had computer tones on the other end. This is what he was hunting for. A computer on the other end was answering his call. This fascinated him. So, he would use his computer to try dialing that phone number just to see what the computer was saying.
So, he connected to it, and it said something; S. S. That’s it? One letter, the letter S? What does S even mean? He tried typing some commands, but he just kept getting the same response; S, S, S. Hm, that was weird. It seemed like anything he typed, he would just get an S back. Then he tried typing some numbers, but this time he got something different; W. W? This was all too obscure, and frustrated Paul. S or W is all he was getting from this computer? He started smashing all the keys to see if any of them worked, and nope. All of them either gave S or W back. Lame. Out of desperation, he picked up his phone, which was connected to his modem, and he just blew into it. Take that, computer! [Music] Then his computer lit up. Suddenly, a series of characters began to fill the screen.
He was getting way more than S and W now. He tried new commands now, and whoa, suddenly he could talk to the computer on the other end of the line, and it would respond to him in code. Whoa, he got in! With the brief gust of hot air, Paul had reset and taken control of a machine that belonged to the phone company. He tried typing a command; log in. He had been on BBSs before and read about what commands that phone computers use, so he was just trying random ones. ‘Print’ got him access to useful files. ‘Show users’ returned a list of employees that he could impersonate to gain access to get more privileges on this network. He told his friend Eli about this computer.
Eli thought, oh, you must have gotten into an SCCS, a Switching Control Center System, AKA the beating heart of the city’s telephone system. It appeared he was, in fact, in a telephone switch, and this was for the New York Telephone Company. This controlled calls and phone numbers. It was part of the inner workings of the phone company. He wanted to try something. Nothing big, just a little something just to prove this wasn’t a dream. So, he looked up his friend’s phone number, which was in there, and it showed which features his friend had. So, he gave his friend a new feature free of charge, three-way calling, and then logged out. This is where you could call two people at once. It was real fancy at the time, and cost extra. This was hacking at its finest in the 1980s.
Discovering a computer all on your own by war-dialing — out of all the numbers in the world, you found one that works — figuring out a way to get into it, and then finding some useful commands, then to do a little something just to prove you were there? Oh man, how cool. Paul got a real high from this experience. If connecting to BBSs felt like wizardry, getting into a computer like this was on another level. It wasn’t just magic anymore. This was god powers. This was bending reality, creating from nothing, unlocking truths that were buried deep in the mysteries of the internet. This is what hackers lived for in the eighties. [Music] Ever since that Esquire article in 1971, people got more and more interested in phreaking, and that just grew and grew.
By the way, even though Esquire popularized and romanticized blue boxes and phreaking, they never got in any trouble for doing that. In November of 1985, a new online magazine published their first issue. It was called Phrack, which starts with a PH. It’s a combination of ‘phreak’ and ‘hack’. Now, back in 1985, there weren’t even web browsers yet, so Phrack didn’t have their own website to publish their e-zine, too. Instead, they published Issue #1 on a BBS and encouraged people to share it, spread it to other BBSs. So, it did. Any hacker BBS worth its salt back then had a copy of Phrack. Honestly, it was just a text document, no photos in it. Text files were king back then mainly because it was faster to send text over the internet, because images were really big and took forever to see.
So, text files were just where it was at. Issue #1 of Phrack had some interesting articles. Like, well, there was one just how to make international calls. Not for free; just how to call internationally if you ever have to. It had a list of country codes and had to dial them. But it had some pranky stuff in there, too. Like, did you know you could call a phone company, state that you’re someone else, and tell them ‘I no longer want service, and could you please terminate my number?’ That’s how you can get the phone company to disconnect someone else’s telephone.
There’s stuff in there like how to use a PBX if you’re ever on one, and there’s an article about how to pick locks, and an article on how to make acetylene blue bombs, basically saying put some rocks and Fun Snaps in a plastic bag, fill the plastic bag with acetylene, a highly flammable gas, throw it off a building, and when it hits the ground, the Snaps create a spark, and that explodes the balloon, making a loud noise and a big ball of fire. See, anarchy was pretty popular on BBSs back then. It was everywhere you looked; bomb-making tutorials, lock-picking techniques, shoplifting advice, how to bypass security systems, and other urban survival guides. I just ran a Twitter poll asking people if they ever went online when they were a kid and saw plans on how to make a flamethrower.
Half my followers said, yes, they did see plans on how to make a flamethrower when they were a kid. A real popular book among teenagers then was The Anarchist Cookbook, which had schematics and diagrams on how to make bombs, explosives, and cause havoc. I was fifteen when I first saw it, and it spooked me a bit. This seemed like serious destruction. But I took a look at it again just now, and it looks like it was written by kids for kids. It’s not very detailed. Some of the ideas don’t work at all, and there’s no safety precautions to follow. I remember going into a bookstore when I was a kid. It was Walden Books, actually, in the mall. I was just walking through the bookstore, and one book caught my eye and it made me stop dead in my tracks. The title of the book was Steal This Book.
[Music] It stared at me like a dare. Go ahead, steal me. I swear, I thought long and hard about it, but ultimately didn’t. I couldn’t ask my dad to buy it for me either, because it seemed like it was a book I wasn’t supposed to have. So, I just grabbed it and flipped through it, and it was wild, very anti-establishment, part survival guide, part political manifesto. It was encouraging me to steal, to rebel against capitalism. Crazy stuff was in it; how to hitchhike, how to dumpster dive, where to get free clothes, how to make smoke bombs and disrupt phone lines, how to run a pirate radio station. It was written in 1971. Again, it’s wild to me that Ramparts was raided for publishing an article on how to make a mute box, but half the kids in the seventies and eighties were finding schematics on how to make bombs online.
A good percentage of them were actually trying to make them, which is even more wild. eBay has banned The Anarchist Cookbook now from being sold there, which — a book that practically half my followers have read as a teenager is now banned on eBay. I’m telling you, anarchy was in style in the eighties. There was a certain attitude that Steal This Book and The Anarchist Cookbook possessed, and that seemed to carry right on over into what the internet culture was like in the eighties. It was counter-culture, anti-establishment. There was distrust of authority. Smash the system. It wasn’t just a vibe. It was practically the first principles that a lot of people were operating at. The early internet wasn’t slick or sanitized. It was raw, lawless, DIY. Sharing of text files was like sharing of contraband.
Whether you were reading articles on how to pick a lock or get a free phone call, on how to make a bomb, it all seemed to have some sort of cloak of secrecy. What you were doing was accessing forbidden information that they didn’t want you to see. The internet felt like a digital back alley where SysOps were gatekeepers to secret knowledge. [Music] It was punk rock at its core. It was cyber-anarchy. It was the idea that the system could be subverted, bent, and reprogrammed. It wasn’t just fun. It was freedom. These kids would take the shiny, polished world and peel it back and look into the guts and wires and bits and bytes that controlled it. They found themselves in control of it. They didn’t need to ask for permission. You scavenge parts to build computers. You cracked programs instead of buying them.
It’s like the rules were suddenly optional. Obstacles were just challenges, and the world was incredibly fun for those who were curious of how it worked. A lot of these ideas were coming across my screen as a teenager, and that shaped me to who I am today. Yeah, there’s a schematic for how to build a flamethrower on my computer. Interesting. This stuff gave me an enormous amount of destructive power, and I had to learn what to do with that power. Did I make a flamethrower as a kid? Absolutely. It was just hairspray and a lighter, but it did spray fire. Did I make bombs? Absolutely. I’ve gotta say, I’m really lucky that I didn’t blow off a finger or set the whole house on fire, since that could have easily happened with all the things I was doing. The ethics of stealing would come up again and again.
Stealing is wrong, but the phreakers of the 1980s had a different way of looking at things. To them, making a free phone call by hacking the system wasn’t theft. It was exploration. Here’s the logic; they’d place calls late at night when the phone lines weren’t very busy. The infrastructure was already up and running whether they were using it or not. Their calls didn’t displace anyone else. It didn’t congest the network. It didn’t cause the phone company anything extra. So, if no one lost anything, was anything really taken? That was the ethical loophole that they lived in. If there’s no marginal cost, no harm, and no deprivation, then how could it be theft? Many phreakers genuinely believed this. Others didn’t care because, let’s be honest, a big part of the scene was driven by anti-authoritarianism, curiosity, and a taste for anarchy.
Things really started to heat up in 1984. At that time, AT&T wasn’t just a phone company; it was the phone company, a telecommunications giant with a stranglehold on every call made across America. It was massive, monolithic, and seemingly unbreakable. To many in the underground, anarchists, hackers, phreakers, it was the very symbol of centralized control, the system incarnate. But in January of that year, the unthinkable happened. The US government stepped in and forced a breakup. AT&T was declared a monopoly too powerful for its own good, and under legal pressure, it was torn apart, shattered into eight separate entities, the so-called Baby Bells. For those watching from the digital shadows, it was seismic. The unbreakable had broken.
[Music] A vast, unified network had splintered overnight, and with fragmentation came opportunity, new cracks in the system, new scenes to explore. The wires were alive again with people probing, learning, exploiting, looking for hidden stuff. It was the dawn of something wild, a freer, looser, more chaotic network, and the perfect playground for cyber-anarchists ready to test their limits, and Phrack was there watching it all. The digital magazine seemed squarely planted in the hacker, phreaker, and anarchy culture. The authors of the articles were kids in the scene, voices from the digital underground. Let me read a passage from Phrack. ‘During the summer of 1984, an idea was formulated that would ultimately change the face of the computer underground forever.
This particular summer, a huge surge in interest in computer telecommunications placed an incredibly large number of new enthusiasts on the national computer scene. From out of this chaos came a need for learned instructors to help pass on their store of information to new throngs. The need was met by nine hackers who formed a group called the Legion of Doom.’ Now, the name sounds pretty menacing, Legion of Doom, or LoD for short. But really, the name comes from a comic book. The group of super villains in DC Comics is called the Legion of Doom. In fact, one of the guys who started the LoD hacking group went by the name Lex Luthor, which was the arch nemesis of Superman. Phiber Optik was one of the members of Legion of Doom, and that’s Phiber spelled with a PH. Here’s a clip of him talking at a convention in New York fifteen years ago explaining what it was.
PHIBER OPTIK: LoD was one of the first organized hacker groups in a very disorganized computer underground. The main purpose of LoD initially was to take information primarily that was found trashing at Telco’s central offices and type it in and make it available in what were known as LoD tech journals, which were available online in text file sections of bulletin board systems, so-called elite bulletin board systems.
JACK: Oh yeah, trashing was big back then. This is where you would go behind an office and look through their trash. They would look for phone numbers or computers or manuals on how to configure things, or any sensitive information that the company had thrown out. Phone companies were of particular interest to trash. Again, the ethics of stealing comes in. Is it stealing when you’re taking it from someone’s trash can? The sixteenth episode of Dateline NBC actually interviewed one of the Legion of Doom members.
JANE: Good evening. I’m Jane Pauley.
STONE: And I’m Stone Phillips, and welcome to Dateline NBC. How do real hackers operate, and just what kind of damage can they do?
JACK: It’s so weird to me that you could turn on the TV back then and learn what trashing was.
STONE: Adam belonged to an elite hacker club called the Legion of Doom. One of the methods he used to obtain secret computer codes was to rummage through the trash at Bell South, the regional phone company in Atlanta.
ADAM: Let’s see, back a few years ago, they weren’t locked. You could just slide the doors open, reach in, grab a bag, and leave.
JACK: [Music] Now, one thing that was worth its weight in gold to these hackers were simply manuals for how computers worked. Again, there was no Google to search for how something worked. Again, there were no browsers even invented yet. There was no YouTube to walk you through a tutorial on how to use a computer or an application. If you got into a computer that was giving you funky messages back, you probably had no idea how to operate it. A simple manual on how to use that computer would have been amazing, but it was extremely rare. You had no idea what commands to type on it. The phone company did have manuals to these computers — obviously someone had to know how to use them — but they were very well-guarded documents.
They did not want to share it, because if the wrong person got the manual, it meant they could do anything they wanted in the telephone network. Keep in mind, passwords were not always mandatory back then. Security was often through obscurity, actually. Like, hide your computer by not sharing the phone number with anyone, and don’t show anybody how to use it who isn’t authorized. So, they often relied on nobody knowing what the phone number was and nobody knowing how to use it even if they did dial it. The word ‘cybersecurity’ didn’t show up until 1983. We’re talking about the land of computers before cybersecurity was even a thing. What a magical time that was, because honestly, the whole internet had doors wide open anywhere you looked. It’s just that the doors were hidden, and it was up to you to find them.
So, members of the Legion of Doom would go searching through trash cans behind telephone companies, and when they found something, they would type it up and share it on their LoD BBS for others to see. In this way, they started amassing all kinds of random manuals and documentation that the phone company was throwing out. I want to stress so many of these articles didn’t show you how to hack anything. It simply was a manual that the manufacturer gave out for how to use their own computers. Legion of Doom quickly became the most respected, most desirable BBS in the entire hacking scene, trafficking in all kinds of precious information about telephone and computer systems. It was the place where any hacker worth their salt wanted to be. Okay, so, Ronald Reagan comes into our story here, president of the United States at the time. He went to the movies, and he saw this.
DAVID: [Typing] People sometimes make mistakes.
COMPUTER: Yes, they do.
JENNIFER: How can it talk?
DAVID: It’s not a real voice. This box just interprets signals from the computer and turns them into sound.
COMPUTER: Shall we play a game?
DAVID: Oh.
JENNIFER: I think it missed him.
DAVID: Yeah, weird, isn’t it? [Typing] Love to. How about global thermo-nuclear war?
COMPUTER: Wouldn’t you prefer a good game of chess?
DAVID: [Typing] Later. Let’s play global thermo-nuclear war.
COMPUTER: Fine.
DAVID: Alright. Wow.
JACK: That’s the 1983 movie WarGames. It’s a film about a kid who got into a computer thinking he was just playing a video game, but it turned out to be a military computer, and it triggered a bunch of real alerts that — the government thought they were under attack, and all-out war was breaking out. Well, the story goes President Reagan saw it and asked around, is that possible that that could happen to us? They thought about it and came back to him and said, yes, a kid could trigger a war if he got into the wrong computer. Then Reagan said, well, what law is there to stop someone from doing that? And there wasn’t one. There was no law against hacking into computers in the 1980s. Technology always moves faster than the government.
If you broke into a computer, looked around, downloaded things, changed data on there, there was no law saying that what you were doing was illegal. It was a paradise for hackers to just roam free and explore without worry. Can you imagine such a time and place? [Music] So, Reagan’s like, well, we can’t have that. On October 12th, 1984, US Congress passed the Comprehensive Crime Control Act, or CCCA. It was a classic tough-on-crime bill. It upped the penalties for growing and selling marijuana, it expanded judges’ powers to deny bail to defendants, and it created for the first time ever a computer crime law. The police were excited to use this law to catch ‘em some hackers.
I think honestly WarGames and Hollywood scared the government so bad that they thought hackers were capable of anything and they were dangerous thugs, terrorists, causing chaos and destruction on the internet. They were the next big threat to America, and the feds wanted to get ahead of this and stop it. The police started their campaign with sting boards, BBSs designed to look like a hacker BBS, but it was secretly operated by the cops. The first ones were created in 1985. There was the Underground Tunnel, and it was operated out of Austin, Texas. It was run by a hacker calling himself Pluto, but really it was just a police sergeant. There was another BBS set up by the Maricopa County Sheriff’s Office in Phoenix, Arizona called The Phone Company. It sounded a little like ‘on the internet, no one knows you’re a dog’ kind of operation.
But according to Bruce Sterling, the guy who wrote the book The Hacker Crackdown, these sting boards actually worked, at least sometimes. Most hackers at the time were just young men who barely knew how to type twenty words per minute, and maybe they watched the movie WarGames themselves, and they were curious on how to hack. So, they’d float into a cool-sounding BBS like Underground Tunnel. It seemed legit and allowed them in, so they’d look around and then they’d slip up and get in trouble, maybe by trying to buy or sell something stolen like a credit card. But all they ever saw were noobs doing dumb things, like people saying they can hack into something, but then it’s all talk, and police had no evidence to prove that they actually were dangerous.
As far as I know, the sting boards did not result in any actual arrests. I really think it’s because most of the phreakers and hackers back then weren’t really doing anything that bad. There was something I came across which I think really emphasizes the lightheartedness of it all. Here, let me show you. Back in the early nineties, there was a radio program called This American Life. They interviewed some teenage hackers at the time, and they found this one kid who would try to steal credit cards from people and then use that to buy things for himself. It sounds bad when I say it, but listen to how this kid describes how he stole someone’s credit card.
CARDER: Basically, the way it works is this. You call up somebody. You say, this is the AT&T operator. I have a priority collect call for so-and-so’s name. You have to — the whole point is you have to sound like you’re not calling somebody up with the intention of getting them — you have to sound like you’ve been sitting in this chair for ten hours and you want to go home. So, you gotta go, this is the AT&T operator. I have a collect call from Paul. Will you accept charges, sir?
Uh, yeah, I’ll accept charges. Alright, hold on one second. You tap on the keyboard. You say, I’m sorry, you seem to have a restriction on your phone line. You can’t accept collect calls to this line. Then they yell and they go, what do you mean I can’t accept collect calls to my line? I’ve been getting collect calls to this line for twenty years. Then you gotta go, sir, there’s nothing I can do about it. My computer says you can’t receive a collect call on this line. Would you like to try an alternate billing method? In which case they’ll proceed to either give you a calling card or a major credit card.
JACK: But the thing was, despite this clever, little plan of theirs, they were wildly unsuccessful at it. I mean, listen to what Ira Glass thinks of these kids.
IRA: But K-Rad, Mr. Warez, and Fred were involved in very low-level types of crimes. All of them involved computers. They pirated software. They scammed free CD-ROM games. They cheated one of the big online computer services out of a few hundred dollars and online time. Oh no, they didn’t steal very much, and they didn’t steal very effectively, but they did try to steal.
JACK: He doesn’t think much of these kids, does he? He’s not scared or intimidated by these crazy hackers at all. He seems to understand just how low level of a crime this whole thing is, and maybe doesn’t even believe that they’ve done any of this. Oh, and it’s kind of funny; I’ve been accused of being Ira Glass a lot, actually. I’m not Ira, but This American Life was a huge inspiration to me. I adore Ira Glass, even met him once. So, I actually have a picture with me and Ira, and he’s kind of a hero of mine. But it’s wild. In this episode, Ira Glass follows these three hackers into a hacker convention in New York City.
HACKER1: Yeah, I just really want to stress that, you know, we’re not that — in other ways we’re not bad people and we don’t go around trying to screw off people in any way we can, ‘cause we’re not at all. You know, I do social work, I tutored kids, I do a lot of stuff which isn’t necessarily evil and more good. But sometimes it’s just like — I don’t know, man. I like doing it. I can’t explain it.
IRA: Well, talk about that part of it. What is the thrill of doing it?
HACKER1: That’s the first — that was the reason I started carding, was the reason. It was the thrill of going — when you went in there, it was real — it was like Mission Impossible. We went in; we had gloves on and stuff, and we picked it up. We had like — we had it all worked out. We were connected. We had lookouts and stuff. It’s a lot of fun. It’s like, you’re doing stuff that is not exactly legal and — not legal at all, and it’s fun.
IRA: We took the elevators up to the floor where the hackers convention was taking place. K-Rad said that real hackers do not use their skills like this. They do not use their skills for personal gain. They don’t do carding. They don’t steal. The whole idea of computer hacking is that — for these guys, anyway, is that it’s a kind of pure Zen pursuit. It’s an ends in itself. You break into the computer for its own sake and to look around and for the knowledge of everyone, especially you. We stood in the hallway. People streamed by. We tried to move to a corner where we would not be overheard, and K-Rad said actually that they had never really talked about their illegal activities this much before with anyone.
K-RAD: The most thing I’m worried about is I’m actually starting for the first time to say this all out loud, everything I’ve done, and suddenly it doesn’t sound as hacker-much anymore, and I’ve known that ever since I moved into — and doing maybe some credit card thing. That’s why I’m in fact even considering giving up on doing all the carding and stuff like that, which is — seriously, I am.
HACKER2: My worst fear is that I’m gonna end up going to hell for doing this, and that’s my worst fear.
IRA: Do you believe in hell?
HACKER2: Yeah, I do.
IRA: And you think you can go to hell for getting a computer on somebody else’s credit card?
HACKER2: I don’t know, I hope not. I really hope not.
JACK: See, that’s the kind of kids that the police were creating laws for, they were setting up sting boards for. The Secret Service was investigating kids like this because they thought they were dangerous criminal terrorists. Did they sound like dangerous criminal terrorists to you? Federal authorities were putting a ton of effort and time and resources into stopping these kind of kids. It just seems disproportionate to me. I was just reading the book Hacker Crackdown today, and I read this part where lawmakers in Arizona, the people who were trying to crack down on hackers, were scared to leave their office at night because they park their car in a bad area of downtown Phoenix.
They said people would rob their cars, break into windows, and threaten them if they went to their cars too late. Yet, these lawmakers seem to ignore the crime going on in their own parking lot and focused on kids like this who often weren’t even stealing anything at all, just poking their nose into the phone company’s computers just to look around, to do something to prove they got in. I mean, listen to what Adam says, a member of the Legion of Doom, when questioned on Dateline NBC.
ADAM: At Bell South, we were able to get into all manner of computers, the phone switches themselves.
HOST1: In essence, you got to where you could have turned off everybody’s phones in Georgia.
ADAM: Just about any one of a couple dozen of us could have done that.
HOST1: For more than a year, Adam and his friends had free access to the inner workings of twelve Bell South computer systems. [To Adam] They say you could have crashed or broken the 911 system here.
ADAM: The operative word for me is ‘could have’.
HOST1: You could have done that?
ADAM: Yes. I could go out and shoot people. You can.
JACK: See, that’s one of the big things I see again and again in this story, breaking in versus causing harm. Legion of Doom seemed to love the challenge of getting in, but rarely did much once they did get in. Just getting in was fun enough. There was no need to cause damage. That wasn’t their goal. It wasn’t what they did. They just liked finding ways in. But the more Legion of Doom got access to, the more the police got more worried that they would take down the whole internet or the phone system or something. Maybe in some way I could see why the police were worried, because of all this anarchy rhetoric online at the time. All this talk about bomb-making and stealing and tearing down the government and smashing the system might have caused the police to worry even more than they needed to.
At times it did feel like the internet was forming some kind of army to cause chaos. But a lot of hackers and phreakers had no intention of causing chaos. [Music] The police didn’t have a very keen eye when it came to trying to catch hackers. They didn’t understand this culture at all. They accused a lot of people of being part of Legion of Doom even when they had nothing to do with LoD. LoD was trying to be pretty secretive. To get into their BBS, you had to be on the allow list, which meant the police couldn’t get in to see what was going on there. That was a double-edged sword. The more notorious that LoD became, it meant the more interested that the police became in them.
But if you did happen to get the password to get into the LoD BBS, you’d see technical journals describing telecommunications and computer systems in a remarkable level of detail. Just looking at the table of contents of one of their now-leaked documents, I see Part 3: Step-By-Step Switching System Nodes. Part 4: A Guide to the PrimeOS Operating System. Part 5: Identifying and Defeating Physical Security Intrusion Detection Systems, Part 2: The Exterior. That last one is written by the LoD founder, Lex Luthor. Lex Luthor’s post, despite it being Part 2, is still 5,200 words long. This kind of insider knowledge and exclusivity was enough to earn LoD plenty of respect, but they also had information that they refused to publish even to their private board because it was too sensitive. Even members were limited to how much they could see.
Like, there was a special section on the board called The Fifth Amendment, which had a document describing in detail how to break into PBX phone systems developed by the Rome Corporation. A PBX is a device used to make phone calls typically operating internally in the phone network, but sometimes in large businesses who have a lot of phone lines. Someone at LoD got the manual for this PBX and read through it, and in there they learned that phone technicians can use a PBX to listen in on phone calls to perform maintenance and troubleshoot. Built into the PBX was a way to spy on calls. Because LoD knew this, they could if they wanted spy on phone calls, too. They could listen in on someone else’s call. That was one of the documents posted on their Fifth Amendment BBS, which members were only allowed to read but never copy. Here’s Phiber Optik, one of the members of LoD, talking about it at the Hope Conference.
PHIBER OPTIK: I want to take a few moments to rewind a little bit and speak on behalf of our rules that we live by in our community long before the FBI and Secret Service succeeded in infiltrating our community. What I will say is this, is that we’ve always spoken of the quest for knowledge as being most important in our pursuits, that this was always a noble cause, that the destruction of systems, crashing systems, was always something that we avoided doing at all costs. Whether by accident or as a joke, it was something that was always frowned upon. The fact that information about technology should be freely available was something that we always held to be of great importance. So, we always frowned upon companies who charged money for technical documentation and information about operating systems, which was very hard to find in the 1980s, for example, which is why trashing and things of that nature were so popular, was — a lot of the times was to find manuals on how to use the systems that we were getting access to.
JACK: I think that was where the heart of it all was, the belief that information should be free. [Music] Not stolen, not sold. Free. It was less about exposing secrets and more about liberating knowledge that was locked behind corporate firewalls or buried in obscure systems. Hackers weren’t trying to destroy anything. They were trying to understand it, document it, and share it. Phone manuals, switchboard maps, internal memos, obscure technical how-to’s, all of it was fuel for their curiosity. Publishing that information wasn’t just rebellion; it was a public service. It was about leveling the playing field, about making the closed systems of power readable to anyone with a terminal who was willing to learn. For many, that was the real prize. Not money, not chaos. Access.
The idea that no system should be so sacred that it couldn’t be understood, that knowledge wasn’t a crime, that documentation wasn’t dangerous, that teaching others how things worked wasn’t subversion. That was empowerment. Again, let me quote from Phrack Magazine. ‘LoD members may have entered into systems numbering in the tens of thousands. They may have peeped into credit histories. They may have monitored telephone calls. They may have snooped into files and buffered interesting texts. They may still have total control over entire computer networks, but what damage have they done? None, with the exception of the unpaid use of CPU time and network access charges. What personal gains have any members made? None.’
They were curious teens testing the limits of what was possible. They weren’t supposed to be able to get into the Telco and listen in on phone calls, but they could, and that made it feel like what they were doing was impossible, and that brought a great sense of satisfaction on its own. But the police were convinced they were evil anarchist super villains. I mean, Legion of Doom is a group of super villains in the comic books, right? I was talking with a friend the other day, and he said that the more menacing a hacker group name sounds, the likely more innocent that they are, and the more innocent the name is, the more dangerous it probably is. Like, Legion of Doom sounds dangerous, and Lizard Squad sounds pretty silly, yet it’s really the other way around.
[Music] The sting boards caught some of the noobs who wanted to be in LoD, but the police really wanted to stop the core members of Legion of Doom. There was one hacker named Wasp who started crashing computers at Bellcore. That’s the telecommunications research and development arm of the Bell Telephone Company. He was just going in smashing up the place, taking things down, just causing havoc in the phone company. Long-time Legion of Doom member named Ctrl C saw this and was like, no, no, no, that’s not right. We don’t crash systems. You’re gonna give hackers a bad name. This guy, Ctrl C, he has his own storied history with Bell.
He used to do trashing runs behind the company’s branch in Michigan, and he learned what documents they would toss behind, and he learned enough that way to learn how to hack in and give himself free long-distance calling whenever he wanted, mostly so he could connect to BBSs around the country without having to pay long-distance fees. But Michigan Bell caught Ctrl C in 1987, and they found out that this big, bad hacker was actually a pretty likeable, harmless kid. He definitely didn’t have any money to pay back all those long-distance connections, and arresting him wasn’t worth their time, so they turned him into a kinda local mascot. Posters went up with Ctrl C’s face on them around Michigan Bell’s offices, warning employees to shred their trash. He actually signed the posters.
Even better, he got on their payroll to help them secure their phone company better, all while he was still in Legion of Doom. This wasn’t as uncommon as you’d think, too, and in this case it ended up benefiting everyone. So, when this Wasp guy came in crashing around at Bellcore, breaking things, Ctrl C recruited some of his LoD colleagues, which included people from Georgia like the Prophet, Leftist, and Urvile. Together, the LoD members helped Bellcore’s security team lure Wasp into a honey pot, which is a machine used to log a bunch of activity once someone connects to it, and Wasp was caught, and LoD came out feeling good about it. Don’t go crashing systems or LoD will come after you, and you don’t want a hacker group coming after you. Of course, the cops didn’t focus on that side of LoD.
They thought they knew LoD, and they stuck to their preconceptions that hackers are troubled criminals. In fact, the investigation got bigger. The Secret Service started getting involved. I think the FBI starts getting in there since hackers are getting free long-distance calls, and this makes it a federal crime. Let me read to you a passage from The Hacker Crackdown, Bruce Sterling’s book. ‘As early as 1986, the police were under the vague impression that everyone in the underground was Legion of Doom. LoD was never that large, but LoD got tremendous press, especially in Phrack, which at times read like a LoD fan magazine, and Phrack was everywhere, especially in the offices of Telco’s security.
You couldn’t get busted as a phone phreak, a hacker, or even a lousy codes kid or warez dude without the cops asking if you were a member of LoD.’ LoD complained about this on Phrack. The Legion of Doom has been called everything from organized crime to a communist threat to national security to an international conspiracy of computer terrorists bent on destroying the nation’s 911 service. Nothing comes closer to the truth than bored adolescents with too much spare time. Now, despite the almost total lack of cybersecurity in a lot of systems then, there were hacker conferences going on. The oldest-running hacker conference is Summercon. It started in the eighties by Phrack Magazine. The feds thought, well, if we want to catch a hacker, Summercon is the place to be. It’s swarming with hackers.
[Music] So, in 1988, the Secret Service went to Summercon in St. Louis to try to find hackers committing crimes. Now, if the Secret Service shows up to a hacker conference with their earpieces and nice suits, they’ll stick out like a sore thumb, so they needed a disguise, but not just a disguise; someone to pose as a hacker themselves, an insider. So they got a mole, someone who looked and talked like a hacker. They even gave their mole a nickname, Dictator. Dictator and the Secret Service went to St. Louis and got a hotel room right next to the conference. It was your classic sting operation. The Secret Service set up in the hotel room right next to Dictator’s room, and then drilled holes in the walls of the hotel room so they could put cameras up and one-way mirrors and microphones.
They had full surveillance of Dictator’s room. So, then Dictator goes into Summercon — hey, fellow hackers — and meets some dudes at the conference and invites them back to his room for a hang-out sort of party thing and stuff. The Secret Service got all excited when they saw hackers filling the hotel room. They watched intently, excited to catch a hacker in the act. So, they sat and watched, ears perked, equipment on. But they were disappointed. It was just a bunch of nerds hanging out talking nerdy, like how frustrated they get when someone picks up a phone in their house and disconnects them from the internet, or they were comparing modem speeds. It was a big waste of time. But then they do witness a crime. One of the hackers pulls out a can of beer and drinks it.
Oh no, he happened to be under the legal drinking age. That was the only crime that the Secret Service saw at Summercon in 1988. These curious and bored teenagers involved with LoD stayed out of trouble for the most part. They didn’t think being a hacker was bad or illegal at all. If we back up a bit, the word ‘hacker’ was coined by the kids at MIT’s Model Railroad Club. To them, a hack was simply a playful or clever solution to a technical problem. The computer hackers of the eighties had their own idea of what a hacker was, and it was never criminal. Here’s some people at a hacker camp in the 1980’s explaining what they think the word ‘hacker’ means.
CAMPER: A hacker is just a person who hacks away at the computer keyboard until the program works. Now, a cracker on the other hand is almost the same thing. He just hacks away at that keyboard but until he breaks into, cracks the system security on a computer.
CAMPER2: A hacker never finishes a program. A hacker will get to a point where a program does something — they maybe take a deep breath and say, how can I make it do this? How can I make it do that? It’ll just keep working. The hacker often will show up with a computer until he collapses at the keyboard or something.
STEVE: They do not have so much the normal friends to distract them, other activities to go to. They don’t generally have girlfriends, anything that’s gonna need a large attachment, commitment of their time. The computer is it and only it.
JACK: That last voice was Steve Wozniak, who we can easily say was one of the greatest hackers of all time for creating Apple computers. [Music] LoD kept out of trouble for the most part, even when they broke into newer and bigger networks, but this wasn’t going to last forever. This was going to be the last time that hackers got to enjoy free, un-scrutinized, harmless fun. On October 16th, 1986, President Ronald Reagan signed into law an amendment to the CCCA, that computer crime law I talked about earlier. The amendment was called The Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, or CFAA, and this was legendary. This one was important. You see, the Comprehensive Crime Control Act, the CCCA, from 1984 only defined a very narrow range of illegal computer crimes.
It banned using computers to try to obtain national secrets or financial records or hack into government computers in general, and that was about the gist of it. The CFAA starts out with a whopper of a statement saying it’s illegal to access a computer without authorization. Wow. But wait, it goes on. It also says it’s illegal to exceed authorized access. That part, exceeding authorized access, is one of the most absurdly broad and legally sloppy phrases to ever make its way into federal law. What does that even mean, because who decides what’s authorized? Because the truth of it is that everyone violates this all day, every day, because the way it’s written means that if you violate the terms of service of an app or a website, that means you exceeded your authorized access or used the site in a way that you weren’t authorized to do.
That means you just committed a federal offense. So, that lie you put on your dating profile — it’s against the terms of service to lie on there, which means you’re using the site in an unauthorized manner. Your company issued you a computer for work? It’s for business use only. If you check Facebook on it, that’s not authorized activity. Sharing your Netflix or Spotify password with a friend? That’s unauthorized use of the service. I could just go on and on about how many times you’ve probably violated this or used a website in an unauthorized way. Like, have you used a browser plug-in to fill in a form on a job application or when purchasing concert tickets? That’s a violation of their terms of service since you can’t use automation when interacting with the site. Have you played Solitaire on a school computer?
Illegal. You’re authorized to use that computer for educational purposes only. Used a coffee shop Wi-Fi without buying anything? Illegal. Unauthorized access. That’s for customers only. Can you tell I hate the CFAA? That’s just the first line of it. The CFAA effectively criminalizes violating the terms of service. Every day millions of people technically break this law by doing totally harmless things, and while most people aren’t prosecuted, the law gives prosecutors a loaded weapon to easily take someone down, and they do it all the time. The law goes on. It talks about spreading malware, performing denial-of-service attacks, insider attacks, stealing passwords, altering and destroying someone else’s data, and this law made in 1986 still reigns as one of the predominant computer hacking laws today.
It’s poorly written, vague, and outdated, but most of all, it’s misused. If you’ve ever heard someone get arrested on this show, they probably got charged with violating the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act of 1986. What it meant back then for hackers like the LoD was that all of a sudden, a lot of what they were doing was no longer child’s play. It was now a federal offense. A federal offense. Did they understand that? Did these guys follow what politicians were doing in Washington DC? I bet most of them did not have a clue. But more importantly, have you ever met a teenager? The quickest way to get them to do something is to tell them that they can’t do it.
HOST2: What’s the lesson in your story for other hackers?
ADAM: Don’t get caught.
HOST2: Not ‘don’t do it’.
ADAM: People are going to do what they’re going to do.
HOST2: How do you think it plays to people at home when you tell others simply don’t get caught?
ADAM: That’s their own business. I don’t think it’s right for other people to tell me how to live my life, so I shouldn’t tell other people how to live their lives.
HOST2: Yet you acknowledge that hacking is wrong.
ADAM: Smoking is wrong. Taking drugs is wrong. People do it all the time.
JACK: That was Adam, a member of the LoD. In September 1988, Adam’s friend, another member of the LoD called The Prophet came across a document that stunk of wrong. He got into a computer at Bell South and was looking at the files on it, just curiously looking for manuals that might be interesting, and he stumbled onto a three-page text file called Bell South Standard Practice Control Office Administration of Enhanced 911 Services for Special Services in Major Account Centers Dated in March 1988. It’s a long file name, so I’m just gonna call it the E911 file. But it was an incredibly technical and boring document to read. It’s just a few pages of the thickest jargon you can imagine.
There weren’t many people in the country who would be able to make sense of this, but The Prophet thought that this was something special, something coveted. A manual for Bell’s 911 service? [Music] The Prophet grabbed this document from Bell South’s computer. Again, the ethics of stealing is brought up here. He didn’t rob Bell South of the document. He copied the document, and Bell South still had their copy and had no idea that he grabbed a copy of it. So, is it really stealing? The Prophet was a little scared of this document, so he stashed it on a friend’s computer. He didn’t even want it on his own device. The Prophet then shared this E911 manual with Craig Neidorf. That’s White Lightning. Craig was one of the founders of Phrack Magazine. Craig was like, whoa. Prophet’s like, yeah, whoa.
Craig was like, we should publish this in Phrack. Prophet’s like, I don’t know, there’s a lot of sensitive stuff in here. But together the two of them censored out all the extra sensitive stuff like phone numbers and specific Bell South employees’ names, and that pesky warning at the top, ‘Not for public use or disclosure’. So, on February 25th, 1989, Phrack published this E911 document under a random name that they made up. But now everyone could see it. It was spreading around all the BBSs in the underground. The Prophet tried to distance himself from this document. That’s why he stashed it on someone else’s computer. But that guy’s computer that he stashed it on found it and saw it, and saw that Prophet is who put it there.
He looked at it, and this E911 file looked serious, so he passed it on to a friend, and his friend agreed and passed it on to AT&T, and they passed it over to Bell South. Bell South was very upset that their manual was exposed. There were two versions, a highly-redacted one on Phrack, and the original one that Prophet copied. It made Bell very uncomfortable to see such a highly-sensitive document out there in the hands of hackers. By the time Phrack published the E911 file, [music] the telephone companies and police were already on high alert for what hackers might be plotting against the phone system. So, this made them turn all their attention to Phrack to find out who was making this and put an end to them, and who published this article. Their worries were validated a few months later.
On June 13th, 1989, it was a really weird day for criminals of Palm Beach County, Florida. If you had to call your probation officer on that day and you dialed up the number for the Delray Police Station, you’d end up chatting with a lady named Tina. Tina was in New York, and she was a phone sex worker. It’d be weird. So, you’d be like, what? So, you’d hang up and say, I must have gotten the wrong number. So, you’d dial the police station again, but again you would get Tina saying something sexy. Someone had rerouted the Palm Beach probation department number to a phone sex line in New York, which I think is pretty funny, right? This is classic hacker pranks. Come on, that’s funny, right?
The cops didn’t think it was funny at all, though, nor did Bell South, and it was time to put an end to these hackers. Bell long suspected that hackers would come after them, and this was proof that they were able to attack. Bell South quickly formed an intrusion task force with more than forty employees working overtime. For weeks, twenty-four hours a day, security experts rotated in twelve-hour shifts, running through countless records, trying to piece together what happened. How were these calls being rerouted to a phone sex line? What they found out shocked them. Someone had remotely connected into the phone company and tampered with the database. They were creating ghost phone numbers with no personal information attached and nowhere to bill to.
How dare someone generate phone numbers with no one to bill to? Quick, someone tell the Secret Service how awful this crime is! So, they called the Secret Service and told them. Not long before that, the company had introduced a new digital diagnostics program called REMOB, short for remote observation. Hackers not only knew about it, but they figured out how to reprogram it and take control of it. It allowed them to eavesdrop and spy on any calls they wanted. Ira Glass went into the apartment of one of the hackers who was there in the eighties doing all this.
ACID PHREAK: So, I got kind of a lot of equipment around here. I’ve got a fax machine here. I’ve got — in my room I’ve got five phone lines. I got a two-line phone, but I’ve got — everything else connects to computers or a fax.
IRA: There were cheesy kung-fu movies on video. In a CD-player there was old-school rap, Nine Inch Nails, The Doors, Jimmy Hendrix. Then he says, let me show you the good stuff, and he pulls out Xeroxes of old spiral notebooks.
ACID PHREAK: I have here what was seized from me that they had to return back to me. It’s my evidence examination report by the United States Secret Service, subject Acid Phreak. These notes have basically all the systems I got into. Look, I have little sketches and diagrams of how things work, different protocols and networks, definitions. See, all that stuff was really good. I had stuff outside the country, NASA.
IRA: It’s something defense? What is that?
ACID PHREAK: Government defense.
IRA: Government defense.
ACID PHREAK: Yeah, that’s a Washington number. McDonald’s. Since I had Telenet, I had McDonald’s accounts. If you were a McDonald employee, I could raise your pay. So, that way you’d get $15 an hour for shuffling burgers and stuff.
IRA: So, did you decide just at random to help someone out?
ACID PHREAK: I’d do it to anybody. I just wanted to know how.
JACK: Can you imagine that, changing the pay rate of your friends at McDonald’s? Well, this guy Ira interviewed says he didn’t do it. However, there was a kid who did. A sixteen-year-old kid in Indiana learned what was needed to get into McDonald’s computers, and his friends did work there. So, he stole one of the logins for the managers at McDonald’s and got access, and he actually gave his friends raises, which was epic. From then on, that kid was known as the Fry Guy. Fry Guy was immature, though; loud, a bit annoying. He was the kinda kid who would claim to be in LoD but actually wasn’t and would never be because he was a scammer. He created this crazy, elaborate way to steal money from Western Union and credit card companies.
It was really intricate, and he would reroute the victims’ phone numbers to a nearby pay phone so that when the credit card company would call the victim to confirm a charge, it would then go to the pay phone outside Fry Guy’s house. He would answer it and say, yeah, yeah, I do approve that charge. [Music] He ended up stealing $6,000 this way, and he would boast about this on BBSs. People would be like, dude, you are breaking the hacker code. Stop doing that. A month after the phone-sex prank, on July 22nd, the police caught Fry Guy, and suddenly he wasn’t cocky anymore. He buckled pretty quickly under pressure, and he admitted to all the stuff he did. But then he just kept talking. He added like, oh, it wasn’t all me; Legion of Doom was doing it, too. This was a story that made sense.
In the cops’ eyes, the Legion of Doom were the bad guys. Fry Guy offered to testify against the Legion of Doom despite never even being part of it. He told the police that the Legion of Doom are planning to take out the telephone network on a major US holiday. I think it’s the fourth of July. I’m pretty sure he just made it up to try to get out of trouble, but the cops took him very seriously. He became a golden informant. But this news was every police investigator and phone company’s worst nightmare. The Legion of Doom was going to take out the phone company? Man, that would bring America to a standstill. But July fourth was a long ways off, so the prosecutors were starting to think that maybe this kid was just a windbag, and they again focused on trying to figure out who was in LoD and to find them and arrest them.
But the LoD was good at hiding, and the cops could simply not find enough evidence on them to figure out who was in it, and would have to wait for someone to slip up. [Music] On January 15th, 1990, it was a US holiday, MLK Day. At 2:25 p.m. Eastern Time, a call-routing computer switch at AT&T failed. No problem. There are other switches, backups. A single failure is not a big deal. But the failed switch sent a message, ‘help me’, to a second switch, and the second switch didn’t help. It failed, too, and on to the third, the fourth, the fifth, the fiftieth. A cascade of phone switches were all failing one after another. The AT&T network was going dark across the country. In the control room at AT&T headquarters in New Jersey, dozens of screens were stacked two stories high.
They showed data feeds, charts, and maps of the US peppered with dots and lines representing phone services to hundreds of millions of people. This afternoon, engineers and technicians watched as red flashes spread from one screen to another. Around 60,000 people lost their phone service. This was before the internet, so it wasn’t like you could just text someone instead. Businesses froze. Services were interrupted. Conversations and lunch dates were abandoned. Almost 50% of calls through AT&T failed. For around nine hours, more than 70 million phone calls were impacted in all. News of this outage started spreading through all the LoD members. Hey man, did you hear? AT&T is down. Oh, what happened? Nobody knows. Did you do it? No, of course not. [Music] LoD started to get nervous, though.
Maybe one of them did do it. If not them, then maybe it was the work of a cyber-attack, maybe someone that they taught. They were puzzled, too, and worried. Imagine being that US attorney from Indiana that day. Fry Guy said that LoD was planning a big attack on a major US holiday, and here’s a major outage on Martin Luther King Junior Day. Was this what the sixteen-year-old scamp predicted? He just got the date wrong? The police thought this must be the work of Legion of Doom. They were the ones with the stolen telephone manuals, hacking the phone companies, and they could reroute calls and mess with the 911 systems. If anyone could take out the phone company, it was definitely Legion of Doom. But was there any evidence?
Some initial reports suggested that there might have been a bug in the system. Did hackers exploit that bug or did they trip over it? Did that matter? The phone companies were down and someone was to blame. Nobody really knew, but the police and Secret Service weren’t going to take any chances of this happening again. They decided now is the time to strike, to take out whoever they thought hacked the system, and their number-one suspect was the Legion of Doom. But they were gonna discover that Legion of Doom was only the beginning. There was a second hacker group called the Masters of Deception, and this story is about to get way more crazy. Not because of the hackers, though, but because of the police who totally got out of control. But you’ll have to join me in Part 2 to hear the rest of this story. Part 2 comes out in one week.
[END OF RECORDING]